Bald Ibis (Funny story)

[Colin Key]

I alluded to the way I was thrown off a golf course in my attempt to get shots of six Bald Ibis, some of which I have posted in my album, but I was given some information yesterday which turns this into a funny story:

There have been a number of mediocre digiscoped shots of these birds which are currently residing at Salgados golf course after fleeing from the Spanish re-introduction program in Cadiz (they have also visited Vilamoura golf course so clearly have an affinity with the game!).

I arrived at Salgados Golfe on Saturday 17th January to find the place heaving with golfers (it was the first sunny day for a long time) and spotted the birds feeding with Coot and ducks near a pond just to the right of the club-house. With difficulty I found somewhere to park the Land Rover, set up my gear (heavy combination of Canon 1DMk3, 500mm lens and tripod) and crept around the edge of the high fence which stops balls bombarding the car-park. I was trying to be as inconspicuous as possible in the shade of some trees when a group of four golfers came past. They were rather "toffee-nosed ex-brigadier" types but they knew all about the birds and told me that every night they roosted on the fence at the clubhouse next to the security lights for warmth. They also said that the birds were so tame that you could almost touch them and on several occasions they had to be "moved on" before the golfers could proceed. They said I should go much closer if I wanted to get some good shots.

I did this and managed to get some frame-filling images of most of the six

http://www.pbase.com/accentor/image/108304669.jpg

birds, 186 shots in total. I was so absorbed in what I was doing that I failed to realise that I was actually holding up the progression of golfers on a rather busy day and a group of about a dozen had built up a "bottle-neck" at the previous "T". The next thing I heard was the sound of walkie-talkies behind me and suddenly two security staff grabbed me by each arm and frog-marched me off the course. Luckily my gear was not damaged, which was my big concern, and I was satisfied that I had some good shots so I meekly left the scene after being told never to come back, with or without photographic equipment (I wanted to kill them, but there were too many witnesses!).

Yesterday I met someone I have know for a few years who spends the winter in the Algarve and is both a birdwatcher and a golfer (he often plays at Salgados). I related this episode to him and he told me that on that very day, late in the afternoon, someone had inadvertently left the entrance door to the clubhouse open and four of the Bald Ibis had wandered in and ....ped all over the floor of the reception area!! :laugh::laugh::laugh:

True story, I assure you.

Colin :smile:

[john c]

Great story. Perhaps all those efforts not to imprint the young birds weren't quite as effective as they'd hoped!

John

[Kenwin5]

Good story.
I managed to get shots of these same birds without being evicted. I had been told that they were at Salgados by several people I had met birding but hadn't seen them until my third visit. I'd never seen a bald ibis before and was quite concerned about the identification because they weren't actually bald! I looked up various sites on the web, and eventually found one which suggests that they in fact only go bald in maturity, rather like men! There are also apparently 2 different species, northern and southern bald ibis, and I believe these are the northern type.
I felt rather like I was taking pictures of birds at a zoo.
Is there a story as to how they come to be there?

[Steve Keen]

Forget the ibises, I can't get out of my head the image of four ex-brigadiers roosting every night on the fence next to the security lights for warmth . . .

[Colin Key]

Is there a story as to how they come to be there?

Ken,

There is a story but I have not quite got to the bottom of it yet; when I do I will reveal all.

Myself and another Portuguese birder, Nelson Fonseca, have now managed to read details of the rings on five of the six birds; Nelson has submitted these to the Spanish ringing authorities but not yet got a reply. I have looked at the Spanish website about this re-introduction program but it is not very informative. Things are complicated by another re-introduction program going on in Turkey.

I understand that Spanish ornithologists have actually visited Salgados to look at the birds (and probably to stroke them, kiss them good-night and tuck them up in bed! :laugh:).

I would like to think that these birds might stay and maybe eventually breed (from what I have seen only one is an adult and the others are juvenile/sub-adults), but cannot help but think that have undured too much human intervention in their up-bringing to-date. They have also arrived at a time when the Algarve climate is rather more hostile than they would prefer.

Colin

[MichaelF]

They need the heat to get the toffee noses.

[Colin Key]

Forget the ibises, I can't get out of my head the image of four ex-brigadiers roosting every night on the fence next to the security lights for warmth . . .

I just knew someone would pick up on that when I wrote it, but after reading the draft I think that what I said was grammatically correct!! :laugh:

Colin :beer:

[Colin Key]

Forget the ibises, I can't get out of my head the image of four ......

Bald Ibis perched on the heads of those security guards and .........:ohdear::laugh::beer:

Colin

[Steve Keen]

I don't doubt it was grammatically correct, just one of the joys of the English language that those Iberians with their object and subject pronouns never get the pleasure of.

[shearwater2002]

Colin,you are usually the first to have a say about photographers getting birders a bad name....your behaviour stopped members of this club enjoying their hobby,and may lead to tighter security in the future!

[Colin Key]

Colin,you are usually the first to have a say about photographers getting birders a bad name....your behaviour stopped members of this club enjoying their hobby,and may lead to tighter security in the future!

I am assuming that this is at least partly intended as a "wind-up" (?), but in any case is an ill-informed response.

I did make the point in my post that while I was carefully hiding and taking photos of these birds I was engaged in conversation by four resident golfers who were regulars at this course (not my kind of people, but nevertheless very friendly and well-informed) who actually invited me to go closer to these very tame birds to get better shots with no warning that I might be disrupting the general "flow" of participants. There was certainly no question of my intrusion disturbing "sensitive wild birds" (see Ken's comment above regarding feeling as though he was photographing in a zoo, although he might have been referring to the golfers:biggrin:).

You also know nothing at all about the circumstances regarding the high level of animosity (well, hatred, actually) which exists between conservationists and Herdade de Saudade (the name of the entire vile residential and amenity complex) and Salgados Golfe in particular. If you are interested in the campaign which I and my colleagues, together with RSPB and SPEA and other NGOs, have been waging for several years now to prevent further development destroying the adjacent Lagoa dos Salgados IBA then I suggest you peruse my blog: http://algarvebirder.blogspot.com/ You will have to dig into the archival material and you might find it very boring (much of it is a dissemination of RSPB missives about progress on saving this valuable site and trying to obtain SPA status), but it is a factual diary of events which I started to compile in order to inform the very large number of British birders who visit this site every year.

As far as intrusion onto the golf course and temporarily holding up players for a short while goes, this cannot compare to the constant stream of stupid golfers who break down the fence on the western edge of the course and wander around the edge of the lagoon which, at breeding time, means disturbing if not actually trampling on the nests of Avocet, Little Tern, and the many other species which nest here, simply in their search for "lost balls" (there are so many of them that the gypsies are making a living out of collecting them and selling them back to the club).

I hate golfers, golf courses and the greedy developers who are sacrificing some of the Algarve's most beautiful places to cater for these morons and line their own pockets. It is what Donald Trump is going to destroy in Scotland, but many orders of magnitude greater.

Without the intervention of myself and several others Lagoa dos Salgados would have been lost, but our relentless pressure in getting the RSPB and SPEA involved has resulted in the new owners of this site not only agreeing to retain the lagoon as an asset to their new development but also donating a ruined farmhouse as a future Visitor Centre. They are starting, very soon, to create not just a new golf course but a "Golf Academy" with hotels and thousands of residential units on the beautiful, wild, western side of the lagoon.

So, please, do not chide me for inconveniencing a few golfers.

Colin :beer:

[Andrew Cunningham]

Fantastic! I wish they were as confiding when I saw tham back in December. Everytime I inched closer they started marching off.

Maybe they had been drilled by the ex-brigadiers! ;)

[Colin Key]

A new raised walkway/cycleway now connects the eastern golfcourse with the western side of the lagoon (this is the "Ecovia" which is intended to eventually run from Vila Real on the Spanish border to Cape St Vincent in the south west).

There are a number of prominent signs featuring a picture of a black dog stating that dogs must be kept on a lead (and which are totally ignored). Last Wednesday two of the Bald Ibis were perched on one of these signs and were accepting bread from the hands of passers-by!!! :eek:

I understand that these birds were hand-reared by staff at the re-introduction project in Spain, and it does make you wonder just how advisable it is to release such "human accustomed" birds into the wild.

Colin :frown:

[Jacqueline Burrell]

I have belatedly read your tale of woe. Shame of you, Colin!

I seem to recall that some time ago you made some sarky comments about the number of photos I took on golf courses but covering golf tournaments is one of my least favourite assignments.

However, as the courses here are some of the top birding places, I have been nauseatingly charming to the mainly European golf directors most of which now allow me to turn up when ever I want and even lend me golf carts [complete with iced beer, water and flannels] so I can shift was one makeshift hide to the next without dying from heat stroke.

I am particularly looking forward to a tournament in the near future being played on the edge of the Red Sea in the height of the spring migration. :laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh:

[Maggie & Caroline]

We too have also just seen the ibises at Salgados (at the end of February) but there were only 5 there. In addition to the threats to the birds from the golfers, we were also concerned by the number of micro-lights flying low over and around the lagoon during the holiday weekend. Several flocks of birds were unable to reach the water because of them.

At the beginning of last week the lagoon had been drained and most of the birds, including the flamingoes, had left.

All of the above factors seem to have led to a drastic reduction in the total number of birds in the vicinity of the lagoon in recent years.

[Colin Key]

One of the Bald Ibis (ring number V7J) was found dead on the golf course on 3rd March. Could have been hit by a ball or contracted food poisoning (see my previous post about the birds taking food from the hand). Or maybe it just died of boredom from watching the golf :laugh:

Colin

[DDolan1075]

I will preface this by saying that i am a golfer, and I photograph my birds when I go out birding. I am not any more intrusive on the birds with my camera than somebody with binoculars. i use my camera as my binoculars for the most part, i just record what I see so that I can remember it (I have a terrible memory). I do not carry a tripod, I just hand hold my camera. This means that a LOT of my pictures are bad...

Anyways, my point is that at least here in the US, the golf courses are kind of a refuge for the birds. I get better pictures of more birds on the golf course than I do at home. If the golf course wasn't there, there would be a home there, at least thatis what is going on where I live. Kind of like Central Park in the middle of Manhattan.

I have an entry in my blog that details a fairly good day in terms of interesting birds, not so good in terms of numbers:
http://www.surfbirds.com/blog/DDolan1075/9788/Golfing+and+Birding.html

It sounds like you are dealing with some real jerks over there. Here we would have had a little retired guy come up in his golf cart and ask us to leave or at least get out of the way, but being physically manhandled is way over the top, unless it wasn't the first time that this had happened.